Is anyone else as heartbroken for the Giudice girls as we are after watching the latest episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey?
After weeks of heated arguments between Bravo's Garden State ladies, the nastiness was set aside this week for something a little bit sadder as the season finally caught up to that fateful day in March when Joe Giudice finally had to surrender himself and begin his 41-month prison sentence. Watching Teresa Giudice and her children say goodbye to ol' Juicy Joe made for quite the emotional experience.
Mercifully, Bravo made the right call and didn't intrude on Joe's actual goodbyes with his daughters in the house before he and Teresa got into the car and drove away, allowing for that moment to remain private, but there was still plenty to see that had us reaching for a tissue or two. Each of his girls giving him a birthday cupcake to make up for the ones they won't get to spend with him? Melissa and Joe Gorga's youngest son Joey clinging to his uncle at his going away party? Poor Milania watching her dad prepare to drive away through a window, retreating into the house in tears once the cameras catch her? Little Audriana telling her tough-as-nails older sister Milania that if she cries, she'll make her sister cry, too?
Siggy Flicker said it best: "You would have to be an empty shell of a person for this not to affect you."
Elsewhere in the episode, Siggy took her family to the Holocaust Memorial Park, where her awesome father Mordecai told his grandchildren just how he and his parents escaped the Holocaust, Dolores Catania decided to have a housewarming party now that her remodel is finished and she's inviting all of the women to it (not exactly the sort of energy we'd want to christen our new home with, but different strokes for different folks), Melissa Gorga lectured her store manager with the perpetual look of confusion on his face about social media, and Jacqueline Laurita made Dolores and Siggy hold dirty-diapered baby dolls like crazy people even though the actual pregnant cast member (her daughter Ashlee) was nowhere in sight.
But in the end, this was the Giudices' hour.
"It's crazy what this family's been through and what we're gonna go through," Joe Gorga told Melissa. "It's like a storybook." One with a 41-month delayed happy ending for those four little girls.
The Real Housewives of New Jersey airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on Bravo.
(E! and Bravo are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)